A Year of Building snappycart in Public or 7 Mistakes I Learned the Hard Way

A year ago, I thought the hardest part of open source would be building the package.... It was not. The code mattered, of course. But building snappycart in public taught me that writing the package is only one layer of the job. The harder part is making the project visible, understandable, trustworthy, and worth coming back to. And knowing what I knew did not mean that everyone could get the same vibe and go along with it. So what actually happened? Read on! snappycart started as a practical React cart package, something developers could integrate into ecommerce and SaaS products without dragging in a messy setup. The main reason I created it was to save money on cart and checkout integrations and I immediately saw gap there which prompted me to release my snappycart to the world. Over time, though, it became much more than a package. It became a product, a repository, a contributor space, a testing surface, and a public signal of how seriously I take quality. And this can be easily p